12/11, Like 9/11, Was A Disaster For The West

On their 25th anniversary this week, the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are being widely remembered as representing the beginning of the fall of the West from undisputed global hegemon to the status of a declining, if not an outright dying, civilization. But an arguably more significant event in this slow demise occurred precisely three months later, on Dec.11, 2001: the People’s Republic of China joined the World Trade Organization.

In 2001, China’s economy was still smaller than those of key major economies such as the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, and France. A quarter of a century later, it dwarfs all four nations’ combined GDP. China’s economy is now well over ten times larger than it was in 2001. It became the world’s largest merchandise exporter in 2009, and no longer just of cheap plastic goods, but also of high-end items such as cars and consumer electronics. 

In part, this growth has been achieved via a regime of officially sanctioned double standards. While benefiting from other WTO members playing by the rules, Beijing has performed tricks like providing domestic firms with illegal state subsidies, placing onerous taxes on foreign firms to deny them easy access to Chinese markets, and engaging in acts of intellectual property theft and forced technology transfer.

Chinese manufacturers, able to pay their employees lower wages, were then able to evade former trade barriers to flood the West with their products. This then led to further decline in the West’s own manufacturing industries, with American and European factories shuttering. All this is well-known now, with hindsight, and, for those with eyes to see, was utterly foreseeable at the time.

So why did those Western leaders who oversaw China’s WTO accession not see the obvious? They were blinded by severe delusions about the disappointing realities of human nature.

Trading Places

Allowing China to become a WTO member was not simply about economics, but a gigantic and hubristic exercise in attempted social engineering. There is a parallel between political leaders’ post-9/11 fantasies about the transformation of Muslim populations in Afghanistan and Iraq magically caused by American troops landing there, and equally naive fantasies about the magical transformation of the Chinese people, effected by global free trade rules and Western-style capitalist practices likewise landing there.

Looking back at rhetoric from the tail end of the Clinton administration in 2000, when Clinton and his staff sought to persuade Congress to grant China permanent normal trade relations, one can see a clear parallel with rhetoric from the subsequent Bush administration about the potential civilization-transforming effects of the war on terrorism.

A speech President Clinton made to a Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington in March 2000 has aged badly not only in terms of its economic predictions (“We’ll be able to export products without exporting jobs,” and “We’ll get valuable new safeguards against any surges of imports from China,” Bill incorrectly promised), but even more so in terms of its woefully outdated forecasts about the fundamentals of human nature. As Clinton fondly waffled:  

By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products; it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values — economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people — their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power not just to dream, but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say … [Once this happens] the genie of freedom will not go back into the bottle. As Justice Earl Warren once said, ‘Liberty is the most contagious force in the world.’

This was a full 20 years before the Chinese state later globalized the coronavirus, of course.

War On Terror Or War In Error?

There was even a direct parallel with the laughable war on terrorism–era line that exposure to Western economic and social norms would spontaneously liberate Muslim women abroad. Chinese women don’t literally wear burkas, but, promised Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, WTO membership would help them throw off such metaphorical headscarves nonetheless: 

Increased trade and investment will also increase contact with foreigners, including Americans, and deepen ties with trading partners who live under very different systems in Hong Kong and Taiwan. That kind of openness should especially help to improve the status of women in China, by giving them new opportunities and by making it easier for them to compare their experiences with those of women in other countries around the world.

Twenty-six years later, the number of women currently serving in the top level of the Chinese politburo is precisely the same as the number currently serving in the Taliban Council of Ministers: zero.

Following his post-9/11 invasion of Iraq, on Nov. 6, 2003, Clinton’s successor George W. Bush gave a speech on democracy in the Middle East, in which he began by talking about how WTO-enabled liberalization of the national economy would supposedly boost democracy there:

China has discovered that economic freedom leads to national wealth. China’s leaders will also discover that freedom is indivisible — that social and religious freedom is also essential to national greatness and national dignity. Eventually, men and women who are allowed to control their own wealth will insist on controlling their own lives and their own country.

Bush was clear that similar economic reform in the Middle East would produce corresponding results: just change a nation’s socioeconomic doctrines, and the people will change alongside them. Simple — in theory. In practice, it’s all rather more complicated. The rhetoric from Clinton about China and from Bush about the Middle East tells fundamentally the same lie; all we have to do is change these countries’ corrupt or backward institutions, and they will then automatically become us as a matter of pure political teleology.

It isn’t so. Different peoples have different cultures. Giving them unfettered access to our institutions just gives them a chance to undermine them from within. Realistically, China has not become more like us since that largely forgotten dark day of 12/11, it just exploited this adolescent occidental illusion for its own, geopolitically divergent, ends.

Steven Tucker is a U.K.-based writer whose work appears regularly on both sides of the Atlantic. His latest book is “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science.”